Tough Guise in Paris

I loved the movie La Haine, though I admit a bit of trepidation after reading that it was intense. The last movie that I watched that I described as “intense but completely worth it” was American History X -- also an investigation into violence, race relations and their utter breakdown, scapegoating, and the cost we pay as a society for not doing better. I completely loved that film too, but I wasn’t certain i was up for another viewing.

La Haine shows us a completely different view of Paris than the one we see in film, on postcards, in travel brochures, in depictions of and aspirations to sidewalk markets and cafes. The Paris we explore with Said and his pals is gritty, dirty, depserate and desolate, one with ample idle time from unemployment and little in the way of possible meaningful engagement. My favorite character by far is Hubert, the foil on all the pull-yourself-up talk that we hear in any Western country -- save up, do well, work hard, be your own man. Hubert did that, getting out of a life of crime just in time to avoid a prison sentence, saving two years for a gym that is burned down just before the film opens. Hubert is shown as placidly boxing with his punching bag, acceptance and resignation his tools for handling devastation of his life’s purpose.

His companions, especially Vinz, seem completely opposed to this way of living and looking at the world and their section of society. By contrast, they seem hell bent on respect, convinced that it can be won at the end of a gun, through the right haircut, and to the beat of a tough guise that comes complete with fashion and haircuts as well as swagger.

The misogyny is so pervasive it almost fades into the background. Talk of your sister, your mother, that girl peppers every conversation and even the graffiti to the point that it seems ludicrous that Said takes it seriously enough to be offended. And yet we all are, of course. Women appear to be the only ones who have jobs or homes to share -- the grandmother sits at her dining table while Said and Hubert and Vinz make disrespectful remarks, take food without manners, and shove off to activities unknown.

I loved that the film was black and white, an homage to art films while also nodding to the stark divide amongst those who belong and those who don’t in Paris. There is a subtle moment when the primacy of the Real Parisian shows up during the scuffle on the rooftop between police and the assembled youth. A young man, clearly a True Parisian, is talking with the decorated officer when another officer interrupts. With all the arrogance and authority that only the French seem to have, but have in buckets more than any other country ever, the youth turns to the interrupter, puts his hand up, and tells the non-Parisian not to talk to him, saying “I don’t know you.” There is a moment of tense silence where everyone gets on board, and then the Parisian youth resumes talking with the uniformed officer as though the interruption never happened. There are no consequences for the group, given that the Parisian smoothed things over, but it’s clear that this gathering isn’t wanted, isn’t warranted in the dominant view, and is highly suspicious, despite being guilty of nothing more than indolence, unemployment, and a penchant for hot dogs (which should be a culinary crime in my opinion). The message is clear: No matter what activity is going on, status reigns in Paris.

The film goes on to show us that American machismo culture’s promise of respect through violence and aggression holds sway in Paris no less than in Chicago. The contagion of toxic masculinity continues to spread as we see disenfranchised young men scramble from drugs to guns to find the love and belonging they clearly crave.

Scapegoating is a huge part of this toxicity, on both sides of the fence. Events such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the nightclub attacks, and the Champ Elysees incident of last week only heighten the sense of insecurity and widen the fear-driven social divide. The disenfranchised citizens scapegoat the police, while the ruling class tightens its control on definitions of power, authority and identity, leaving less and less latitude and legitimacy for those who don’t make the cut.

Defining the attacks as acts of terrorism blinds us to the chasm of inequality that drives the young men to violence, leaves an extreme arm of an otherwise peaceful religion the most attractive choice for droves of young men who feel left out, cut out and left behind. One is reminded of the IRA in the 1980s, a desperate use of violence for legitimacy and a future that included them by men who had little to do with the tenets of Christianity. The European man today, no less than the northern Ireland man of forty years ago, is struggling against a narrative of nonexistence, one in which he must shout to be heard, where he owns nothing but his tough posture and a gun. We can all agree with Ben Ahmed: “C’est catastrophique.”

Change Agents and the City

While reading the articles for this week, I was struck by how the Apartheid City structure reflects Roanoke’s geographic and zoning de facto barriers that have been used for voluntary and involuntary racism and spatial clustering. Roanoke’s development continues to take into account and cater to the Creative Class and the Young Urban Professional -- while these are not exclusively Caucasian or any race or even nationality in particular, the Carilion Cadence is the beat of this city’s heart more often than not. To date, that has involved development for the attraction of well-educated medical and creative staff, many of them young, able bodied, and childless, more interested in running the greenway near the pub and shopping a farmer’s market near the loft building than addressing needs of native residents’ lack of access to transportation, food, or equal educational offerings.

To be physically separated is demoralizing; it is a public stamp of approval of different social realities for different folks, of non-belonging and of exclusion. The conditions of exclusion were deemed so offensive and antithetic to the ideals of the United States that they were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 when the Brown vs. the Board of Education case resulted in the ruling that “separate but equal is not equal.” Certainly such stratification and the systemic neglect and violence that go with it seem in direct conflict with the United Nations’ call for “A dignified and secure existence in cities.”

Anderson writes that “Simply living in such an environment places young people at special risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior.” When we look at the decisions made by Roanoke and so many others cities all over the country, the efforts to revitalize urban spaces seems fraught with tension, especially as urban planners work with politicians and existing businesses to ensure the best economic reality while achieving an orderly and aesthetically pleasing design. the problem seems to lie in the idea that the revitalization is appealing and accessible to everyone equally.

Right now gay is hip, so we are happy to have a Gay Pride parade and Pride in the Park festival. Cities are scrambling to follow Roanoke’s example of celebrated inclusion: we happily have festivals for any culture -- Greek, Lebanese and Local Colors are just a few that come to mind. It’s estimated that Roanoke’s population is growing by one thousand residents a year, many of these newcomers attracted by the open and active image that Roanoke has.

But much of the separateness is still ignored by Roanoke, and we are developing two very different Roanokes indeed, one a poster for inclusion and happiness for mostly-young, moneyed, and able-bodied residents in the south and another for those who support the former -- the disenfranchised, mostly (but far from exclusively) African-American who live in the north.

Folkways bump into and often trump mores all the time, but it’s never more apparent than during interactions at the physical and societal edges of public space, where the spaces are inadequate to hold all our various realities simultaneously, and the differences in our individual expectations for behaviors and consequences becomes manifest. When north meets south in Roanoke, the expectations of behavior, language, dress and redress are evident and ultimately no one feels familiar or comfortable. Oppositional cultures seem at times merely one more part of a social system that is deeply stratified -- unified by twitter feeds and facebook groups and how we consume the stream of information from our social networks. The narratives of these networks can be, and often is, dramatically different at any given time. While Twitter might be flooded with the antics on the senate floor or the big reveal in a netflix show, the same timeline of facebook might be wholly taken up with sports plays or the social issue of welfare and the minimum wage.

As Roanoke reclaims and reinvents space -- from previous industrial sites such as along Salem Avenue to undeveloped sites such as Brandon swamp -- to create gathering, activity and residential space, folkways and our internal programming are ruling our interactions more than ever. I am hopeful that Roanoke will slow down development long enough to start listening to matters of justice as well as matters of paint colors and housing needs and development opportunities. It’s time that we look to other, at times informal ways in which urban problems of inequality and injustice are being dealt with effectively. Not to do so is to actively invite these issues to be addressed informally in ways that have proven not only ineffective, but downright toxic for those they serve.

More than anything, the readings show that availability and quality of services makes a huge difference in residents’ quality of life and peace of mind, the very qualities that Anderson highlights as lacking in the streets, forcing street residents to develop, adopt and enforce a behavioral code to address the feeling o of “alienation from mainstream society and its institutions.” This combines with a “profound” lack of faith to create a pervasive context of hopelessness, the lesser of “two contrasting conceptual categories” whose pressures and consequences extend far beyond geographic borders and economic boundaries. In this reality, one can count solely on oneself and one’s own resources of spirit and attitude, and “physical prowess takes on great significance.” In his analysis, Anderson finds “hopelessness and alienation . . . fuels the violence” that so many cities experience.

In a curious twist of events, surveillance has proven a powerful ally in effecting social change in the last decade. The United States culturally rejects state-sponsored surveillance out of hand, decrying an inalienable right to privacy (while demanding that apple, amazon, facebook, and every other tech giant in the land hand over all data and the codes to hack the system). But self-surveillance has become the lifeblood of the twenty-first century equality and social justice movements, and the state has implemented surveillance measures more out of self preservation than of attempts to effect social control. To be caught on camera -- body cam or cell phone -- is to validated and to be accountable. Through this nationwide citizen-level campaign of Observe & Record, we as a culture of the governors and the governed believe we are finally real, that we have a voice, and that we matter. Surveillance is proving to be the real equalizer, whatever Sam Colt might have led us to believe.

The crime and violence is but a symptom, a harsh reality that residents all over the globe know in their bones and are trying to address. When Mexico attempted to let the residents achieve their own solutions, the reality was that power-grabbing and status building led to the same development stratifications and fragmentations as when the politicians were in charge. Having lost sight of their good-natured beginnings, “community organizations in Mexico City serve largely as Low-income real-estate developers.” Money, politics and a system seem to come together to create their own self-sustaining streams of existence, and seem to be far from David Harvey’s vision that we can “change ourselves by changing the city.”

Ultimately, if we are more interested in self-serving aims -- the bolstering of our own social status or the increase in our personal profits -- we are not going to be able to realize the change we want to see. We must genuinely start acting as though everyone is equal and has the same right to the best social services, from libraries to restaurants to sidewalks and schools. Perhaps the message is to change ourselves to change our cities.